But despite its brilliance and drama, the Saint George fresco proves to be Simone’s undoing. In portraying the princess rescued from the dragon, Simon has impulsively given the princess the face of the lady Laura. To be sure, the face is small — only a few inches high — but the few people who have glimpsed the work in progress seem far more interested in the princess than in the miracle worker Corsini, the Virgin, the Christ, or the dragon-slaying saint. As he puts the final touches on the dragon, Simone considers altering the princess’s face, but stubbornness or pride overrules the voice of caution, and he leaves it unchanged.
On the Sunday morning that the frescoes are unveiled, a huge throng gathers before Mass to file through the portico and view the paintings. On hand to bask in their admiration is Simone, standing just inside the door with Giovanna beaming beside him. A hundred people have already filed through to gawk and congratulate, and another two hundred still crowd the stairway and street outside. Simone leans out the doorway to see how the line is moving, and what he sees nearly drops him to his knees. She — the young countess herself, Laura de Noves — is at the top of the stairs, stepping onto the porch. Dressed in the green silk, she wears a pendant around her neck; the stone, which rests on her breastbone, is a large ruby, cut in the shape of a teardrop…or a flame. Inching along beside her, his hand resting possessively on the small of her back, is a thin, sallow man with sparse red hair and watery blue eyes. Trailing the couple is a nursemaid, carrying a small child on her hip. The boy’s hair, eyes, and skin are black, brown, and tan: the earthy tones of Siena; the earthy tones of Simone — his father!
Simone staggers backward into the nave, then flees to a side door, leaving behind hundreds of disappointed admirers. Just before stepping through the door, he turns and sees his wife staring at Laura and the baby, Madonna and child. Even in the dim light of the church, Simone can see recognition, shock, and betrayal dawning — no, flashing like lightning — across Giovanna’s face as she takes in the pale woman and the dark boy who is so clearly Simone’s.
Simone stumbles down the hill and hurries to his studio, where he sinks onto a stool and slumps forward onto the table. The cathedral frescoes were not his penance after all — if anything, he realizes, the foolish arrogance of the Saint George scene only added to his guilt, because Giovanna is now wounded by the knowledge that he has been unfaithful to her…and has even fathered the son that she has never been able to give him. Now, not only has Simone betrayed her trust, he has broken her heart, shattered her innocence. He groans and sobs as he comprehends the full extent of his shame. Then, with startling, piercing clarity, he suddenly understands the penance he must perform. Somehow, he thinks, I must find a way to portray the death of innocence — my innocence, Giovanna’s innocence, the world’s innocence. And how better to represent the death of innocence, he realizes, than a death portrait of the innocent Christ modeled on the blameless dead man God has sent his way again. What was it the jailer had said? “His sin, I think, was to be holy, to be free of sin”?
Clearing off his worktable and unrolling his dusty sketches of the dead monk, Eckhart, Simone finally begins the penance he has been avoiding these past two years. The penance for betraying Giovanna.
CHAPTER 35
Simone snatches a rag from his worktable and savagely wipes the tempera from the wooden panel. He has painted a dozen images of the dead man now and has destroyed them all, finding them bland and insipid — utterly lacking the force of that stark corpse laid on the floor of that stone cell; completely devoid even of the force of those charcoal sketches he made by flickering lamplight almost a decade before.
He returns, for the hundredth time, to the sketches. Unlike his polished attempts with paint, the charcoal images of the man are rough but powerful. Why can’t he render in paint what he captured in charcoal? Because, he thinks, a painting is too artful, too refined: a glittering object to be admired from a distance, not a force to be experienced and shaken by. The power of that scene, and of those sketches, lies in their rawness and immediacy. In the moment back then, and even in the sketches now, there is no possibility of distance, of a safe retreat into studied appreciation of color and technique, of composition and balance, figure and background, gilded borders and halos. The Death of Innocence cannot be a painting, he realizes; it must be something stark, spare, and haunting.
But sketches are not enough. Simone grasps the power of these rough sketches on coarse paper. But ordinary eyes — seeing humble materials — might be misled into dismissing the images as trifles; might not take them into their minds and hearts. Simone must help people let down their guard and open their hearts. To do justice to a man who was as innocent as a dove, Martini must be as cunning as a wolf.
An image pops unbidden into his mind: The Mourning of Christ, painted by Master Giotto on the wall of the chapel in Padua. The limp body of Jesus is surrounded by weeping followers; grieving angels hover overhead, their hands outstretched or clasped or clapped to their faces in dismay and grief. Behind the mourning people, a low rock ledge angles from the picture’s lower left to its upper right. But something about the rock ledge struck Simone as odd the first time he saw the fresco: The ledge’s surface seemed fluid, almost as if it were draped with fabric, and Simone had briefly wondered, all those years ago, if perhaps a burial shroud had been laid on the ledge to receive the body of Christ.
Now, that remembered painting and his own sketches of the dead man combine, and he knows how to proceed.
At a Weaver’s Shop on the Rue de Teinturiers, the street of dyers, he inspects and rejects half a dozen fabrics — too coarse, too shiny, too short — before finally settling on one: a long strip of pale linen woven with a herringbone pattern that adds heft and elegance without calling attention to itself.
He buys the entire roll and takes it back to the studio. Grinding one of his sinopia chalks into a fine dust, he mixes it with egg yolk to make a reddish-brown slurry of tempera. On a small corner of the fabric, he daubs a bit of the mixture, but he sees at once that the contrast is too jarring, the effect not at all mysterious or mystical. Frowning, he picks up another sinopia chalk and draws directly on the fabric with the dry crayon, sketching eyebrows and the bridge of a nose. It’s better, he decides, but still too obvious. To create the haunting effect he’s after, Simone must create a haunting face — the shadow of a face, the ghost of a face. Finally, doubtfully, he takes a sheet of parchment and shades the nose and eyebrows, followed by the rest of the face, but this time he deliberately makes the image dark and heavy. Then he lays another corner of linen atop the drawing. Using the blunt, curved end of the pestle with which he grinds pigments, he rubs gently from all directions, pressing the cloth against the image in dust. After several minutes of rubbing, he folds back the fabric.
Simone gasps. There on the linen, staring back at him, is the ghost of the murdered monk; the ghost of the crucified Christ; the ghost of innocence lost.
CHAPTER 36
I glanced for the twentieth time at the doorway of the library mezzanine, listening for the staccato cadence of Miranda’s clogs as she jogged up the stairs. I’d been waiting for half an hour, and I was getting anxious. It wasn’t like her to be this late, especially when she was the one who’d called the meeting. Our librarian friend, Philippe, who had by now taken an interest in our interests — Eckhart, Martini, and the Shroud — had phoned Miranda an hour before to say that he’d found something intriguing, and Miranda had wasted no time summoning me. Upon arriving at the library, I’d been surprised that Miranda wasn’t already waiting. Now, thirty minutes and a dozen unanswered cell phone calls later, my surprise was turning to genuine worry.